Legends of the Fall

The Garden of Eden is one of those stories that can be interpreted on several different levels.

It’s often said that parents never forgive their children for growing up.

The Garden of Eden is often viewed as a metaphor for childhood. Adam and Eve exist in an idyllic paradise. Their parent is an all-powerful, infallible loving being that gives them everything they want.

However there are conditions to the parent’s love. They must keep the one ground rule and not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

In other words, they must never grow up. And they must remain in a state of unquestioning obedience.

Eve is tempted by the Serpent (peer pressure, curiosity, self awareness, hormones) to eat of the fruit of the Forbidden Tree. “…you will be like gods, knowing good from evil.”

The adolescent is eager to become an adult, thinking that they will be all-powerful, all-knowing and that they can do whatever they want.

Once Adam and Eve eat of the fruit, “the eyes of both of them were opened and they discovered they were naked”. In other words, they discover sexuality, free will and rebellion. They discover that their choices can have far-reaching consequences. They also see their parent as the Man Behind the Curtain.

Once they discover the facts of life, they can never return to an innocent idyllic state and are banished from the Garden. The banishment represents the exchange of childhood for the harsh reality and grim responsibilities of everyday life – hard work, childbirth and domestic unbliss.

The “great winged creatures” and the “fiery flashing sword” barring the way back to the Garden of Eden can represent the idea that once you leave childhood, you can never really return.

As you grow older, you look back on the garden of childhood with the forgiving eyes of nostalgia, perhaps believing that it was better than it really was.

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The Collective Unconscious

The Jungian analyst, June Singer, wrote:

"The wonder of the collective unconscious is that it is all there, all the legend and the history of the human race, with its unexorcised demons and gentle saints, its mysteries and its wisdom, all with each one of us - a microcosm within the macrocosm. The exploration of this world is more challenging than the exploration of outer space."

Golden Shadows

Just as we tend to repress the dark side of our nature and project it onto scapegoats, we also tend to repress our divine attributes and project them onto...scapegoats. These are usually the individuals we see swishing down a red carpet in a designer frock or suit.

We call them stars, idols, and goddesses. We call ourselves fans, short for fanatics.

We grant them royal titles such as the King of this and the Queen of that and place them up on a pedestal.

Sometimes they are bemused by it all. Sometimes they believe all the hype.

Although we're much less worshipful than previous generations, we're still somewhat baffled and unforgiving, if they topple off their pedestal and turn out to be only human.

We talk of stars imploding and call them fallen idols or fallen angels. We get to participate and comment on their downfall on interactive forums like a chorus in a Greek tragedy.

If we lose them prematurely, we might forget about them and replace them with a new icon. Or we might bestow them with immortality and elevate or restore them to cult or godlike status. And then the whole cycle begins again.

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“We all go a little mad sometimes…” Norman Bates, Psycho

[N.B. This post contains spoilers of the movies Psycho and The Talented Mr Ripley]

Psychotherapists, such as Jung, believe that when we repress our desires, our flaws, our sins and bad memories and refuse to acknowledge their existence, we create a Shadow Self. The Shadow Self may be both feared and loved at the same time.

An extreme example of the Shadow Self at work is seen in the movie Psycho.

"A Boy's Best Friend is His Mother"

Norman Bates, the ultimate Mummy’s Boy with a severe case of the Oedipals (“A son is a poor substitute for a lover,” says he) refuses to acknowledge his desires. Indeed he can’t even bring himself to say the word ‘bathroom’ despite being a Peeping Tom.

On the surface, Norman seems like a nice quiet self-effacing chap. But whenever he experiences even a flicker of forbidden feeling, his Shadow Self, in the form of his mother rears her head in a display of “pathological jealousy”.

When Norman eventually becomes his Shadow Self, he loses his own identity. The psychiatrist in the movie explains, “When the mind houses two personalities, there is always a battle. For Norman, the battle is over.”

The Two Trilbys

The psychiatrist’s explanation of Norman Bates’ two personalities is similar to the scene in the novel Trilby when Gecko explains what happened to Trilby under her shadow Svengali.

“There was the Trilby you knew...But all at once—pr-r-r-out! presto!...with one wave of his hand over her—with one look of his eye—with a word—Svengali could turn her into the other Trilby, his Trilby, and make her do whatever he liked...you might have run a red-hot needle into her and she would not have felt it...”

The Demons in the Basement

After the death of his mother, Norman gradually adopts her identity.

In the movie, The Talented Mr Ripley, a similar situation occurs when Ripley adopts the identity of the dead object of his desire. The object of his desire is his Golden Shadow, his idea of perfection, the person that he would really like to be.

Tom Ripley is faced with a future of always having to kill the people he loves so that they never get to see the true face behind his mask.

He says, “Don’t you just take the past and lock it in the basement? That’s what I do. You don’t want anyone to see all the demons, how ugly it all is.”

Tom Ripley’s “private trap” (to quote Bates again) is this basement of the past.

Ripley says, “I’m always gonna be stuck in the basement, aren’t I? I always thought it would be better to be a Fake Somebody than a real nobody.”

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In the movie The Wisdom of Crocodiles, serial killer (Jude Law) tells cop (Timothy Spall) that people try to fight evil by attempting to separate the criminals from the rest of the society "but the line that divides good and evil lies in the heart of every man".

Humans are described in traditional chinese philosophy as the bridge between heaven (yang) and earth (yin).

The human is viewed as being part mammal and part divine, a talking animal or a naked ape. Human beings are a mixture of spirit and matter continually torn between animal instincts and divine aspirations.

Animals aren't evil. And the divine is obviously divine. But somehow the human being has a double nature capable of great genius, compassion, creative accomplishment and spiritual wisdom, on the one hand and unspeakable cruelty, destruction and violence on the other.

There is a continual quest for perfection and a need to be superhuman or godlike combined with an ongoing fascination with evil.

The war between good and evil is conceived inside the individual psyche first and is then replayed in the world at large.



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It's been said that every individual is made up of three different people:

• how you see yourself,
• how other people see you
• and how you really are
  

There is also the Shadow Self. This is the part of our self that we don't like others to see and that we like to pretend isn't really there.

The Shadow is a composite of our flaws, mistakes, fears, bad memories and 'sins'.

The Shadow Self is usually lurking behind a socially acceptable mask that is a paragon of conventional beauty.

It is often characterised in fiction as the 'mad woman in the attic' or the 'psycho behind the shower curtain'.

A lot of the time we see these parts of ourselves that we have rejected, reflected back to us in the behaviour of people we dislike or who irritate us, or in other social groups.

Sometimes other people in our lives or on our screens play out the fears and sins that we repress or are afraid of.

The Beast we fear is reproduced not only in the popular imagination but in the political arena and in society at large. For example, the so-called hoodies are like the new bogeymen.

The more that the dark side of our human nature is feared and repressed, the more it grows and is in some way expressed.

Jung, and other experts of the mind, advocate accepting the dark side of the personality in order to transform it for the better and to integrate it with our whole self.

If we are completely cut off from our dark side, a split occurs and the Shadow escapes from behind the prison of the beautiful mask and takes on a life of its own.

Jung said, "...when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate... when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”

Every character that appears in a person's dreams can be interpreted as being a part of the dreamer's own personality.

If fiction, movies, stories etc. are interpreted in the same way, then Beauty may be seen as the Beast, Marion Crane can be seen as another alter ego of Norman Bates and Christine, the "Angel of Music", can be seen as the Phantom.



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